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Wendy Davis’s meteoric rise, from a Texas state senator who barely won reelection to Democratic candidate for governor and darling of the national party, has hinged on her powerful personal story and a famous filibuster.

But inconsistencies in her teenage mom-to-Harvard Law School graduate narrative, as reported Sunday in the Dallas Morning News, have suddenly put Davis and her high-profile, big-money gubernatorial campaign on the defensive.

And the story, which also contained details of her 2005 divorce that included her teenage daughter’s decision to live with her father, has opened a floodgate of attacks by conservatives eager to dismantle Davis’s compelling biography.

Radio host Rush Limbaugh and the conservative blog RedState have seized on the story, which reported that Davis was divorced at age 21, not 19, as she has previously said; and that she lived in a trailer home after the split for a briefer time than suggested in her public profile.

And other GOP critics have engaged in online Twitter conversations questioning not only Davis’s veracity, but also her fitness as a mother. They’ve used the piece to broaden their criticism of Davis – from the reported discrepancies in her narrative to her “ambition” and details of her failed marriage.

“This is an early test for Davis,” says Jim Henson, who directs the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas. “She is neither the first nor the last person in politics to have to answer questions about a campaign’s preferred narrative.”

“Most of the fundamentals in that story were out there – maybe there was some additional first-hand reporting, and maybe a few new stray facts,” he says. “Part of this story is about how a relatively standard piece in the Dallas Morning News got picked up and amplified by the pre-existing conservative infrastructure,”

(Both the Texas Tribune and the Houston Chronicle had already published lengthy stories that looked at Davis’s past, including details about Davis’s divorce, and the fact that her second husband helped pay for her Harvard schooling by cashing out a retirement account.)

For her part, Davis was first apologetic, saying this, to Dallas Morning News reporter Wayne Slater: “My language should be tighter. I’m learning about using broader, loose language. I need to be more focused on the detail.”

But by Monday, she was staunchly defending her life story. And Tuesday, she used a series of late-day tweets like this one to excoriate her critics: “The other side has reached a new low — attacking my family, my education and playing politics with something that is deeply personal.”

Her supporters likewise took to Twitter, and other social media platforms.

“I wonder how many times Wendy Davis would have had to empty the sewage tank on her trailer for it to suit millionaire Greg Abbott?” tweeted Democratic strategist Harold Cook, referring to the GOP front-runner for governor.

Cook says he sees a deep vein of sexism in the right’s broadening criticisms of Davis.

“Abbott’s allies are trying to harm the credibility of a successful woman,” Cook says. “If this were a story about a male candidate who became a father early, whose wife helped him through law school and took care of the children while he was in school – well, that’s not news, is it?”

“The fact that Davis isn’t a male candidate is the only reason anyone considers it news and Republicans try to paint it as a scandal,” he says. “It’s not news, and it’s not a scandal.”

Davis captured national attention last summer when she staged an 11-hour filibuster in an effort to block legislation limiting women’s access to abortion. (The GOP-dominated Texas legislature eventually approved the bill, which bars abortions at the 20^th week of pregnancy.)

She was immediately seen as a rising star, someone who had the potential – if slim – of becoming the first Democratic official elected statewide in Texas in two decades. She and Abbott, the Texas attorney general, both raised over $11 million in recent months for a race expected to eventually cost each north of $40 million.

Republicans have repeatedly downplayed Davis’s prospects at capturing the top office in red state Texas. But the aggressive reaction to what many describe as minor narrative fudging (Abbott’s campaign characterized Davis’s bio as a “fanciful narrative”) suggest that they may see her as a long-shot, but not a no-shot.

“The ball is very squarely in the Davis campaign’s court,” says Henson, of the Texas Politics Project. “This will be a test of its ability to respond to something hard, and to counter-punch.”

“Do the Democrats have the strength to fight it out with the Republicans right now?”

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President Obama plans to meet this spring with Pope Francis.

On Tuesday, a White House spokesman announced the president will visit the Vatican as part of European trip in March. The president is said to be looking forward to talking with the pope about their “shared commitment to fighting poverty” and income inequality.

The meeting will be the two men’s first face-to-face encounter, but Obama has carefully followed the pope’s progress since Francis took charge of the Catholic Church ten months ago. As Obama told MSNBC in an interview last month, he likes what he’s seen.

“I think Pope Francis is showing himself to be just an extraordinary thoughtful and soulful messenger of peace and justice,” Obama said.

The president is particularly taken with the way this pope has stressed economic fairness, passing up many of the luxurious trappings of his own office while reaching out to the poor. Obama quoted the pope during a speech last month on income inequality.

“How could it be,” he wrote, “that it’s not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”

John Green, an expert on politics and religion at the University of Akron, says Obama is likely to be more simpatico with Francis than he was with Pope Benedict, whom Obama met with in 2009.

“This president and this pope seem to be very much on the same page when it comes to elevating that issue to the top of the agenda,” Green says.

The Catholic Church still has serious differences with Obama on issues such as abortion and the administration’s controversial requirement that most health insurance policies include free birth control. Green says while those doctrinal differences haven’t gone away under Pope Francis, they have taken a back seat.

“This pope has chosen to de-emphasize, at least here early in his papacy, the emphasis on the social issues and to focus more on economic issues,” he says.

Obama has also promised to make shared economic growth his number one focus during his last three years in office.

Of course, it’s possible Pope Francis will use their March meeting to confront the president on issues where they disagree, much as Pope John Paul did with President Bush over the Iraq war.

Whatever the two men discuss, Green says, it’s unlikely to sway many voters back home, where American Catholics rarely take political marching orders from the pope. Still, for a president trying to add some symbolic shine to his own tarnished agenda, Green says visiting a popular pope is a pretty good place to start.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

That President Obama could openly speculate about marijuana being less dangerous than alcohol — and embrace the state-level legalization of the drug — is a measure of just how far the nation has moved since the 1980s.

Back then, the Reagan administration’s approach was absolute: “Just Say No.” It’s more complicated today.

Obama’s interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick gave a measure of validation to friends of legalization and served as a buzzkill to its foes. But even supporters of decriminalizing marijuana were careful not to claim that Obama’s statement had altered the overall dynamics of the debate.

For one thing, Obama was characteristically cautious in how he framed the issue, to the point of ambivalence. While he said that marijuana was less dangerous than alcohol — an assertion in dispute — he also said he told his daughters that it was “a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy.”

He seemed most concerned about the disproportionate impact marijuana arrests and convictions were having on minority young people. And he also worried about where to draw the line with other more dangerous drugs like cocaine or methamphetamine.

Obama, as a politician and leader of the Democratic Party, is also wary of intentionally putting his party at a political disadvantage especially as the 2014 midterm and 2016 presidential elections come into view.

So while Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML, the best known marijuana legalization advocacy group, welcomed the president’s comments, he wasn’t expecting a burst of federal legislative activity or executive directives from the president’s pen.

“Let’s get politically pragmatic here. His approval ratings right now are not that high,” St. Pierre said. “So the idea of coming out full bore for marijuana legalization is probably not a strategy to raise his overall ratings. Second, he’s a Democrat who would like to hand off his eight-year presidency to another Democrat.

“And so it’s very likely that he and his aides are very conscious of the idea marijuana is a political hot potato,” St. Pierre said. While libertarian conservatives tend to to be pro-legalization, many other Republicans aren’t.

“And so do they want to hand such a massive triangulation to Republicans who would cast Mr. Obama and other Democrats as a bunch of legalizing dopers?” St. Pierre asks rhetorically. Not likely to happen, says NORML’s leader, who has lobbied in Washington for legalization for decades.

Obama was already a target for such attacks from conservatives because of his acknowledgement that he smoked pot and tried other drugs as a teenager and young man, even leading the self-styled “Choom Gang” of young marijuana aficionados.

And it’s not just non-libertarian-oriented Republicans who would oppose the president if he decided to push for federal decriminalization. Patrick Kennedy, the former congressman and son of Sen. Edward Kennedy, who has experienced his own battle with substance abuse, took Obama to task for saying that marijuana was benign relative to alcohol. In a statement Kennedy, chairman of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, said:

“… We take issue with the President’s comparisons between marijuana and alcohol, and we strongly encourage him – a president who has, on many occasions, championed rigorous science – to work closely with his senior drug policy advisors and scientists, who fully acknowledge the growing world body of science showing the harms of marijuana use to individuals and communities. Today’s marijuana is far more potent than the marijuana the President has acknowledged using during his teens and early adulthood.”

Obama’s comments, cautious as they were, could still fuel momentum for legalization at the state level, especially since he endorsed that approach. Only two states, Washington and Colorado, have legalized marijuana for recreational use. Beyond them, 20 states and the District of Columbia have more or less legalized the drug for medical purposes.

As St. Pierre points out, the Obama administration already seemed to aid state marijuana legalization efforts. In the president’s first term, the administration told federal prosecutors that when they encountered medical marijuana situations where federal laws were stricter than state laws, they should defer to the states. The administration’s guidance was something of a muddle, according to some criminal defense experts. Still, it was more than previous administrations had done.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Subpoenas are hitting his closest aides and allies. His approval rating in New Jersey has taken a modest hit. And suddenly, politicians long afraid of him are speaking out about his revenge-style of governing.

But headed into a three-day weekend, there’s some good news for Christie. The conservative base of the Republican Party, long skeptical of the New Jersey governor because of his bro-hug with President Obama after Sandy, is beginning to rally to his side. Here’s some evidence:

1) Christie’s political advisers tell NJPR that national donors who have long coveted a Christie presidential candidacy are calling to express support, not skepticism. According to Bill Palatucci, the governor’s confidante and link to the national donor base, interest in Christie fundraisers spiked after the scandal broke. Christie is headlining events this weekend in Florida for Republican Gov. Rick Scott and the Republican Governors Association, and Palatucci said in recent days he has gotten about two dozen calls for people looking to buy tickets at the last minute.

2) Other potential presidential candidates have taken a wait-and-see approach to the scandal. He has not been publicly attacked by other Republican governors or potential Republican presidential rivals, indicating that Christie’s stature within the party is not yet weakened.

3) The all-important conservative media is actually coming to Christie’s defense. It’s as if he earned some street cred by getting dragged through the media gauntlet. FOX News’ Sean Hannity used the opportunity to slam “liberal media” for not pushing harder on the Benghazi situation: “You can rest-assured that if Christie does go on to run for President, this issue will be mentioned by the liberal media in virtually every conversation or analysis. If Hillary Clinton runs for president, will Benghazi or the host of other scandals similarly coincide with their analysis? Highly doubtful.” Hannity said that compared to the evasive Clinton, Christie handled his scandal with “moral courage.” And Rush Limbaugh, who once went so far as to call Christie a “Democrat,” also rushed to the governor’s defense this week after liberal rocker Bruce Springsteen and late-night host Jimmy Fallon made fun of Christie in a “Born To Run” parody.

4) Polls don’t indicate that Christie’s standing as the Republican presidential front-runner has diminished. A New Hampshire poll from Public Policy Polling taken after the release of the Bridgegate documents indicate Christie has a larger lead among Republicans than he did in September. And get this: 14 percent of GOP voters said it made them like him more.

But about those subpoenas. As Christie takes off for warmer climes, the Assembly committee investigating the Bridgegate scandal has made public some of the subpoenas they’ve issued, including one to the custodian of records at the Governor’s office. Others being ordered to turn over correspondence related to the bridge include:

– Bill Baroni, former Port Authority Deputy Executive Director

– Maria Comella, Christie Deputy Chief of Staff, Communications

– Michael Drewniak, Christie Press Secretary

– Regina Egea, Christie Chief of Staff

– Christina Genovese, Christie Director of Departmental Relations

– Charles McKenna, Christie Chief Counsel

– Evan Ridley, Christie aide

– Colin Reed, Christie Deputy Communications Director

– Kevin O’Dowd, former Christie Chief of Staff/Attorney General nominee

– David Wildstein, former Port Authority Director of Interstate Capital Projects

– Bill Stepien, Christie Campaign Manager/Former Deputy Chief of Staff

– David Samson, Port Authority Chairman

Listen to the report here.

Matt Katz covers Gov. Chris Christie for WNYC and New Jersey Public Radio.

Copyright 2014 WNYC Radio. To see more, visit http://www.wnyc.org/.

If there was a consensus emanating from Congress Friday after President Obama’s NSA reform speech, it was — not surprisingly — that Congress itself has a major role to play in the ultimate fix.

Whether from strong NSA supporters or agency critics, the reactions sounded similar: Congress intends to do much of the steering in the drive to overhaul the NSA’s gathering of certain non-public information, especially consumer phone records, in the nation’s counterterrorism efforts.

Even so, if you listened closely, you could hear the sound of politics in some of the reaction.

For instance, Speaker John Boehner issued a statement suggesting that much of the controversy over former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations of the agency’s spying practices was due to Obama’s failures as a communicator. The Speaker warned the president against letting politics trump national security.

“Because the president has failed to adequately explain the necessity of these programs, the privacy concerns of some Americans are understandable,” Boehner’s statement said. “When considering any reforms, however, keeping Americans safe must remain our top priority. When lives are stake, the president must not allow politics to cloud his judgment.”

Then there was Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a fierce libertarian opponent of the NSA’s current efforts. With a nod toward Obama’s broken health care promise, he skewered the president on CNN immediately after the speech.

“Well, what I think I heard was that if you like your privacy, you can keep it. But in the meantime, we’re going to keep collecting your phone records, your emails, your text messages and likely, your credit card information.”

Much of the congressional reaction, however, lacked any noticeable partisan jabs. New York GOP Rep. Pete King, a member of the House Intelligence Committee and a national security hawk, tweeted after the speech: “Pres Obama NSA speech better than expected. Most programs left intact. But concerned about extending US citizen privacy rights to foreigners.”

What was clear was that some lawmakers expected that they — not the president — would ultimately have to resolve the NSA’s controversial practices.

“Essentially, the president was stronger on principle than he was on prescription,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., in an interview with All Things Considered co-host Audie Cornish. “But Congress is going to have to fill in a lot of the blanks. Congress is going to have to resolve the question of whether this collection should continue and who is going to keep the data and resolve these issues and try to strike a balance, obviously.”

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., suggested that venerable Washington response to complicated controversies: a special congressional panel.

“The vital issues at stake here are complex, broad and cut across many areas of jurisdiction of established congressional committees, including national security, intelligence, technology, commerce, foreign affairs, and privacy. That is why I will introduce legislation to establish a Senate Select Committee to examine all of these important issues and questions,” McCain said in a statement.

All of this suggests we could be headed for a big, politically-tinged separation-of-powers fight, as Obama strives to protect the executive branch’s national-security prerogatives while Congress exerts its oversight powers, all during a midterm election year.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Tom Coburn will leave the Senate with a reputation as “Dr. No,” but not necessarily as doctrinaire.

The Oklahoma Republican, who at age 65 is undergoing his fifth bout of cancer, announced that he will resign in December, two years before his second term expires.

“This decision isn’t about my health, my prognosis or even my hopes and desires,” Coburn, a physician, said in a statement. “As a citizen, I am now convinced that I can best serve my own children and grandchildren by shifting my focus elsewhere.”

The departure of Coburn, a leading conservative who previously served three terms in the U.S. House, will divest Congress of one of its most ardent budget and debt hawks.

His zeal is reflected his annual, much pored-over “Wastebook.” It details examples of what he views as flagrant government spending excesses. Last year’s compilation of 100 included $65 million for post-Hurricane Sandy tourism advertising, as well as $10,000 for a National Endowment for the Arts grant to produce a live “pole dancing” performance that featured power linemen, their bucket trucks and 20 utility poles.

“Tom Coburn was fighting runaway spending long before it was cool,” wrote Jim Geraghty, columnist for the conservative National Review, under a Friday headline that read, “Depressing news this morning.”

Kurt Hochenauer, an Oklahoma Democrat and author of the political blog “Okie Funk,” says that while Coburn’s actions often felt like political theater, his war on wasteful spending resonated across the political spectrum.

“I disagree with Tom Coburn on many issues, but I have found common ground with him at times, especially his interest in wasteful government spending,” says Hochenauer. “Sometimes his actions as so-called Dr. No have seemed like political stunts to me, but I admire his consistency and focus.”

“I also admire that he stands up for his principles and views,” Hochenauer says, “even when it means going against more extreme members of his political party.”

Coburn’s decision to step down early also returns to the sidelines a strict social conservative, but one who would occasionally buck his own party — and who unfailingly avoided vilifying his political opponents.

It was President Obama, in fact, who wrote about Coburn last year for TIME when the senator was named to the magazine’s annual list of its picks for the 100 most influential people in the world.

Obama and Coburn famously befriended each other at an orientation dinner in 2005 when they were both new senators. Their wives bonded, and so did they, the president wrote, “over family and faith.”

The men collaborated, Obama said, on government transparency legislation, trimming earmarks, and efforts to “close tax loopholes that benefit only the well-off and well connected.”

“After I took office, Tom received dozens of letters from Oklahomans complaining that we looked too close on TV,” Obama wrote. “Tom’s response was, ‘how better to influence somebody than to love them?'”

Self Examination

Coburn loved his party, too, but he was willing to give it hell.

He excoriated Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s “defund Obamacare” mission that led to a partial government shutdown last year.

Here’s what he said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program: “To create the impression that we can actually defund Obamacare, when the only thing we control, and barely, is the House of Representatives, is not intellectually honest.”

Back in the spring of 2008, during the height of the chaotic battle for the GOP nomination for president, he accused Republicans of being in a state of “paralysis and denial.” He lambasted fellow party members for hiding a “big-government liberal agenda” (read: spending) inside a GOP package.

Here’s more of what he wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

“Regaining our brand is not about messaging. It’s about action. It’s about courage. It’s about priorities. Most of all, it’s about being willing to give up our political careers so our grandkids don’t have to grow up in a debtor’s prison, or a world in which other nations can tell a weakened and bankrupt America where we can and can’t defend liberty, pursue terrorists, or show compassion.”

After Obama won a second term in 2012, Coburn, who decided to become a doctor at age 30 after his first bout with cancer, urged Republicans to “never give up.”

“Many want to blame our setbacks in the Senate, in particular, on the Tea Party,” he said. “I agree we need to do a much, much better job of candidate recruitment. The problem in Republican politics isn’t the challengers: it’s the incumbents — career politicians who say they are for limited government and lower taxes but make decisions that give us bigger government and higher taxes.”

The Dysfunction Factor

Less than a month ago, Coburn decried Washington dysfunction in a Wall Street Journal commentary headlined, “The Year Washington Fled Reality.”

His disillusionment was palpable, including with Obama for having “conformed to, rather than challenged, the political culture that as presidential candidate he vowed to reform.”

Coburn, who opposed the president’s health care legislation, criticized the disastrous rollout of the law – though in a Senate floor speech in December, he said its health insurance exchanges will ultimately “work, and work well.”

But his real ire was reserved for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who deemed that a simple majority of senators could override filibusters on presidential nominees, except those to the Supreme Court.

Reid’s “narrative about Republican obstruction of appointees is a diversion for his own war against minority rights,” said Coburn, who last year offered more amendments than any other senator.

Coburn’s seat in is expected to remain in Republicans hands when a successor is picked in November, and his party is within sight of winning Senate control.

But Coburn, in an interview with The Oklahoman newspaper, said he’s ready to move on.

“I’ve had a lot of changes in my life,” he told the newspaper. “This is another one.”

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.